Tag: blockchain community

most of us receive many nice X-Mas holiday wishes, and, of course, the Crowdstart team wishes you the same: have some relaxing days and a very good start into 2019!

The year 2018 was an interesting year in cryptoland – we all remember very well the steep rise of most cryptos until mid January, followed by an enduring downturn – known as the crypto winter. Many crypto startups folded, also some crypto venture funds have and will. And, nobody really dares to launch an ICO these days.

Our beloved Crowdstartcoin XSC still is too small in value to either dramatically profit or suffer from overall crypto trends. In 2018, we have continued to distribute XSC to members of the blockchain community who add value to the ecosystem. We have broadened our scope of potential recipients by also rewarding community members who add value by writing blogposts, designing logos and other stuff, doing some administration work, etc. Our overall goal stays the same: we distribute free XSC to those who add value to and therefore enhance the blockchain ecosystem.

XSC Wallet Takes Action

This summer, the Crowdstart team had a lot of fun and made many friends by selling Frozen Yoghurt at the DAHOAM Pure Tech Conference against XSC. It was a very hot day and that helped to motivate the conference participants to download the XSC Wallet, receiving XSC via airdrop and then spending these for FroYo, T-Shirts and goodie bags. Out of 1,100 visitors of the conference 1,049 paid with XSC. That we call a conversion rate!

On a more corporate event, the FI-Forum by FinanzInformatik, the IT backbone of Germany’s saving banks that represent 38% of German retail banking, the Crowdstart team provided the XSC Wallet in its white label version and enabled consulting company zeb to offer the zeb DigiTaler – a very good opportunity to bring crypto payments to the attention of FI-Forum’s 8,000 visitors.

We provide the white label version of the XSC Wallet to other corporate events and (internal) crypto payment pilots, too. Based on the experiences of these applications, we develop the XSC Wallet further, make it more stable and even more secure; e.g. the XSC Wallet will feature a KYC/AML integration, soon.

Member of the European Blockchain AssociationEBA

In November, we joined the European Blockchain Association EBA. This organisation synchronizes blockchain activities and projects all around Europe and is designed as a Decentralised Semi-Autonomous Organisation DSAO; i.e. a DAO based on a comprehensive governance model embodied in a legal entity, registered in Germany. EBA asked the Crowdstart team wether we couod provide Crowdstartcoins XSC as a means of payment and reward for EBA members. Since this is a perfect match – our goals are completely aligned – we agreed and donated 40% of our XSC supply to the EBA. Accoring to their givernance model, the EBA will distribute XSC to its members.

Now, that we – in partnership with the EBA – have laid the basis for a meaningful distribution of XSC, we must create the best possible trading environment for XSC: today, XSC can be traded at EtherDelta, ForkDelta, IDEX and Radar. This is a very good start. However, many XSC holders are unfamiliar with trading at (decentralized) exchanges. Therefore, our goal for Q2/2019 is to be listed at more decentralized exchanges and at one centralized exchange.

Most exchanges require rather high listing fees that we cannot afford because we have never done an ICO and therefore we have no funding for Crowdstartcoin XSC at all. That’s why our goal is rarher challenging. We have approached several crypto exchanges and asked them wehther they would list XSC in exchange against endorsements and recommendations by the Crowdstart team and the EBA. If you are well connected with an exchange, please support us by recommending the listing of XSC! The more liquidity we create the better the result for the blockchain community – let’s aim to make XSC the currency of the blockchain community!

PS: Over the next days we will read and internalise the thinking of this working paper by Nick Gogerty. That should help 😉

Over the course of February as many of you know, we partnered with Pryze to offer an ethereum-based provably fair sweepstakes where blockchain early adopters can apply for a chance to win up to 100 XSC Tokens.

A winner of this giveaway has been drawn by Pryze, but not yet verified their claim to the prize. If they don’t do so within the next 24 hours Pryze will draw a new winner from the entry pool. The winner will have one week to respond.

Once the winner is confirmed we will distribute the grand prize to the sweepstakes winner and draw 99 runner ups who will also receive a smaller distribution. A big thank you to everyone who took part in the Pryze campaign! We’ll keep you informed. The promised tokens are coming!

We at Crowdstart Capital are strong believers in blockchain technology. We have been working on blockchain projects at Datarella GmbH since 2015 – with leading índustry players and organisations. Since we are platform-agnostic, we have worked with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, IOTA, and other blockchains.

One key takeaway of two years of blockchain experience is, that – in the fall of 2017 – most blockchains are still quite immature and a lot of work has to be done in order to make them industry-ready. We see a huge demand for development and investment in not only blockchain-related projects but also in the core blockchain protocols. The key development challenges in 2018 will be to significantly improve the scalability, the stability and the security of blockchain platforms.

As digital organisms fed by communities of developers, blockchain protocols evolve through changes in their code, i.e. either by changes to the original code or through adding a new microorganism – a side chain – by forking the original chain. Both, changes to the original code and forks, could be combined by creating a forkless blockchain with specific rules in the protocol that are created by other rules (see: the Nomic game ). This way, forks would not be needed anymore since rules could be changeable by other rules.

Most industry blockchain projects are developed using side chains. First, that’s to eschew the disadvantages of public blockchains, s.a. PoW, and then, it’s because of the lack of industry-grade conditions in public blockchains. Most, if not all, industry-led blockchain project teams would love to use public chains if they could be used in a reliable way.

Tragedy Of The Commons

That said, strong evolutionary processes in blockchains are needed. But, where’s the incentive for developers to invest resources into the core protocols? The only way to benefit from working on core blockchain protocols is mining tokens and profit from a potential increase in value or joining on elf the blockchain’s foundations and getting paid by them. This imbalance of having no incentive to work on a core technology which everybody would like to see well developed is called the tragedy of the commons: the economic reward for a developer improving blockchain technology is low.

Funding work on core blockchain protocols and thereby the creation of incentives for developers could be provided by private institutions, s.a. Venture Capital (VC) firms, and by public funding, e.g. through a public crowdfunding initiative: the Ethereum foundation could sell Ether through a crowdsale to the developer community working on a specific update in Ethereum’s evolutionary process. For the blockchain’s foundations that would be straightforward thinking.

VCs, however, would have to make sure that their assets, i.e. portfolio companies, profit from an investment in the core blockchain protocol. This could be done indirectly, if blockchain projects don’t need to develop certain functionalities which are already woven in the core protocol, and therefore minimize their efforts and streamline their roadmaps to exit. It can be questioned if that’s an adequate benefit from the VC‘s perspective.

CSC dedicates tokens to the blockchain developer community

CSC’s goal is to foster blockchain core technologies and applications. CSC wants to contribute to helping blockchain evolve into an enterprise-ready technology. In order to lay a basis for a cryptoeconomic incentive scheme to support the development of blockchain-related projects and to provide incentives to developers to dedicate their work to blockchain‘s core protocols, XSC tokens will be dedicated to the active blockchain community.

Developers committing code to key blockchain projects can opt in to receive XSC tokens for every line of code that is accepted for the respective projects. CSC will set up a smart-contract-based system that will pay out the tokens according to the commits. This incentive is meant as CSC’s contribution to the blockcahin developer community – there will be no further obligations, i.e. CSC does not demand any return for this.

Technologies to be supported by these incentives include the core protocols of leading blockchains, s.a. Ethereum. Also, all projects that participate in the CSC acceleration program are supported. In a second phase it is planned, that members of the community will be able to suggest projects to be included in the incentive scheme. Which project should be included will be voted for by the community in token-based ballots.

We know that we won‘t achieve our goal over night. And we know that we might adapt our plan when necessary. Finally, the most important factor is the blockchain community itself. If we can successfully motivate blockchain developers to join the scheme, to use the XSC tokens and to spread the word to their respective communities – then we can potentially crowdstart something new: an efficient incentive scheme for the evolution of blockchain technology.